07 December 2007

Below is a rare article in the middle of winter about Burning Man written by Charles Shaw (aka "Seven" and not TwoBuckChuck!). What I mean by rare is hardly a dust mote is being written about the event at the moment and probably won't be until ticket sales start again next year.

As for being hot for Burning Man, you can be sure that I certainly am. For those of you who pinged me asking me where the lastest BURNcast episode is, all I can say is that I literally have been flat on my back sick. I'm only now starting to feel some semblance of health.

Furthermore, the Tribe.net outtages have been a serious bummer. WTF? I even became a premium member! I'm feeling so disconnected! :( How about you guys?

I have the next episode of BURNcast almost complete but then I'll be taking off for a winter hiatus break. More details when I post the next episode.

Enjoy this new article!

Hot for Burning Manby Charles Shaw

It’s Getting Haute Out There. How Free is the Burning Man?

A shot of the amazing art piece, “Crude Awakening.” This pyro-tech-laced masterpiece is a commentary on our dependence on oil. The figures below worship the 100’ high oil derrick in various positions of prostration. Photo by Catherine Bailey

It begins as a pilgrimage of light inching its way across the Nevada desert. Thousands of cars, vans, RVs, painted buses and mutant art vehicles carrying inside them the minions of “The Man.”

They are some 50,000 strong: neo-tribal fire-spinners decked in bones, feathers, and tattoos; half-nude ambassadors of the love revolution; pyrotechnicians, metal workers, survivalists, demolitionists, DJs, deconstructionalists, atheists, alchemists, and aesthetes. All of them, waiting for Sunday midnight to come so that they can pass into a renewed Black Rock City and begin building this year’s Burning Man community.

This mind-bending cultural bacchanal is held every year for one week in late August on the gypsum powder of the Black Rock Desert near Pyramid Lake in northwest Nevada. From far-flung parts of the globe, Burners come to give expression to possibilities for the human race in unregulated space.

This year’s theme, “The Green Man,” invoked the planetary environmental crises. Perhaps without intending to, this theme highlighted the prodigious waste and consumption at the core of this most unsustainable of festivals, despite its “leave no trace” maxim. Most Burners reacted to the theme with ambivalence, perhaps best exemplified when on Monday night, hidden in the darkness beneath a blood red lunar eclipse, the Green Man burned before his time, torched by a disillusioned dissident disgusted with the size and scope the festival had attained.

Truck sculpture on the playa at Burning Man.Photo by Catherine Bailey

The community pulled together to rebuild him, and the festival continued, driven by Mother Nature, whowhipped up dust storms that rocked the city, crasheddomes and towers, and uprooted whole camps.

On Friday the rains came, followed by a double rainbow that punctuated the intermission between Daniel Pinchbeck’s talk on the coming cultural shift and Starhawk’s passionate address about creating a permaculture from the ashes of our collapsing ecosystems.

Four a.m., Saturday: a meteor shower blitzed the skies as Imade my way to the Sapphire Portal, an evolutionaryinterface that provides an environment for personal and planetary transformation. Inside, we huddled together against thecold through the remaining hours of the night, andawoke to the light of the rising sun pouring through the portal gates, surrounded by people praying, dancing, and practicing yoga.

Saturday night, after the anti--climactic burn, the Black Rock faith-ful watched as “CrudeAwakening,” a massive art installation of nine 30-foot tall metal humanoid sculpturesworshiping a 100-foot tall oil derrick, was destroyed in a massive pyrotechnicexplosion. Although a powerful statement on our obscenely wasteful relationshipto fossil fuels, it was, for the green-conscious, a case of torturous hedonism.

Next year’s theme is “The American Dream.” Already we can hear the distant sirens blaring.

Charles Shaw (aka “Seven”) wrote this article as part of Liberate Your Space, the Winter 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Charles is a Chicago-based writer, executive editor of Evolver/Reality Sandwich (realitysandwich.com) and former editor of Conscious Choice.

06 December 2007

OK, I'm gonna let y'all know a secret. My 'day job' is as a student in library school. One of my classmates sent me the link to this little gem.

I acknowledge that librarians may not be considered the height of coolness (I should know!). But I find this video... baffling, frankly. At first I was excited (ooh, Burning Man and libraries?? neat-o!). I love it when my worlds collide. But what on EARTH does Burning Man have to do with a librarian's manifesto?? Wha'??

The closest link I could come up with was this statement: "I will educate myself about the information culture of my users and look for ways to incorporate what I learn into library services."

Hmm, library services for Burners-- workshops in welding and working with flammable fuels, perhaps? Books on building temporary structures? I'm really reaching here.

I think this is a great example of our 'culture' (if you can call it that) being stereotyped for its coolness factor. Maybe this isn't a new thing, but that it hit so close to home for me was rather surprising. And confusing. Maybe a little bit disconcerting too.

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